Owing to Ash Wednesday falling this week, and because the day’s observances mark the commencement of Lent, there is no more suitable moment in the liturgical calendar for this country’s Roman Catholics to start paying attention to an unconscionable betrayal that His Holiness Pope Francis appears determined to visit upon the clandestine Catholic faithful in the People’s Republic of China.

This is not to be clever or gratuitously offensive. Lent sets aside 40 days to a righteous discipline of sacrifice and devotion, abstinence and repentance. It’s supposed to be a time to reflect upon the obligations of resistance to worldliness and the necessarily personal battles Catholics are duty bound to wage with evil. In that vein, then, in that struggle, in China, Pope Francis himself is giving every appearance of offering up abject surrender.

Even worse, says Hong Kong’s Cardinal Joseph Zen, the Pope is counselling China’s long-persecuted Catholics to follow his example and capitulate to the deepening tyranny of Xi Jinping’s ruling Communist Party. It is as though Pope Francis is telling faithful Chinese Catholics “You are stupid for being loyal for so many years. Now surrender,” Cardinal Zen told reporters the other day.

Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen hands a letter to Pope Francis at the end of his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Jan. 10, 2018.L'Osservatore Romano/AP

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 1936, Pope Francis succeeded the dour, unpopular and private Pope Benedict XVI in 2013. Ever since, he has cultivated a glamorous reputation for championing social justice causes and the plight of the put-upon and marginalized. He routinely weighs in with uplifting and earnest homilies about refugees, climate change, violence against women, poverty, fake news and nuclear weapons. This is all very delightful.

But in China, Pope Francis has lately sided with an establishment faction in the Vatican’s diplomatic corps that is intent upon rapprochement with Beijing. Talks are closing in on a kind of merger between the Communist-controlled “Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association,” established by Mao Zedong in 1957, and China’s underground Catholic parishes.

The Communist-controlled church appoints its own bishops in defiance of Rome and disavows communion with Catholics who have kept faith with the Holy See. About half of China’s 10 million Catholics persist in the pre-Mao parishes, risking imprisonment by attending mass. Catholics are already a small minority among the 80-100 million Christians in China — estimates vary wildly owing to the tradition of worshipping in secret, the complexity of denominations, and overlaps between officially tolerated churches and clandestine “house” churches.

Tu Shouzhe stands on his Protestant church’s roof on July 29, 2015, hours after Chinese government workers cut down the building’s cross, at right, in Muyang Village, in Zhejiang Province.Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Beijing’s persecution of China’s Catholics is similar to the approach the Communist Party has taken with Tibetan Buddhists. Those whose loyalties remain with the exiled Dalai Lama are considered followers of a dangerous separatist and a traitor. The Communist Party has appointed its own puppet to serve as Panchen Lama, the second-highest authority in the religion. The 28-year-old Gyaltsen Norbu is being groomed as the frail, 83-year-old Dalai Lama’s successor. Over the past 10 years, China’s Uyghur Muslims, meanwhile, have been subjected to an unprecedented regime of persecution. Their home province of Xinjiang is now the most heavily policed region in the world, a dystopia of security checkpoints, re-education camps, artificial-intelligence surveillance systems and anti-religious propaganda.

While Pope Benedict went so far as to excommunicate the Communist-appointed bishops of China’s “patriotic” Catholic church, the Vatican and Beijing have struck agreements on the assignment of bishops to various dioceses as far back as the 1980s. But in 2016, Pope Francis approved the ordination of three Communist bishops, and last December the Vatican asked two bishops in Shantou and Mindong to step down to make way for Communist-appointed replacements. And last month, the Vatican reportedly recognized the authority of seven Communist-appointed bishops.

This image taken on April 30, 2014, shows a Christian church in the town of Oubei, outside the city of Wenzhou, that Chinese authorities had begun demolishing on April 28, according to internet postings, after a weeks-long stand-off between worshippers and the local government.Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

On Feb. 1, new regulations came into force governing all religious institutions in China. The new rules shed some light on the sort of church Pope Francis appears willing to reassemble from the catacomb Christianity of his flock under Beijing’s rule. The new laws give Communist Party officials the authority to bar children from religious services, decide the content of religious instruction, and approve or disapprove of the time and place of religious services. The clampdown comes as part of a renewed effort by Xi Jinping to obliterate any ideological deviation from approved modes of thinking.

The Christian rights group China Aid reckons that at least 1,000 church leaders have been arrested for conducting unauthorized services over the past three years. Police have ransacked churches. Informal chapels have had their crosses pulled down. Christians have been instructed to replace pictures of Jesus Christ with portraits of Xi Jinping. Last month, in Shanxi, a church that served roughly 50,000 Christians was demolished by dynamite.

“Unfortunately,” Cardinal Zen wrote in a recent dispatch to China’s Catholics, “as of February 2018, we can expect a much stricter control by the Government on the activities of our brothers and sisters, also because the Government knows that it now has the Holy See’s consent.”

The Vatican’s accommodation of totalitarianism under Pope Francis is not, of course, without precedent, and to appreciate the folly of it you only have to go back to the Vatican’s intimacies with the Spanish fascists of the 1930s, or recall Pope Pius XI’s Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany. During the 1960s, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, with the blessing of Pope Paul VI, pursued an accommodationist policy of “Ostpolitik” with several Warsaw Pact dictatorships. Among the Catholics of Eastern Europe, the policy ended up leaving the Vatican’s reputation in tatters.

The current Pope’s entreaties to Xi Jinping will only end up feeling like “a slap in the face” to China’s Catholics, according to Duke Divinity School professor Xi Lian. “The Vatican risks losing its spiritual authority and dampening the spirit of the Catholics.”

That’s putting it mildly. It’s just one consideration Catholics might reflect upon in the coming days of Lent.